I've heard "sampai" many times in Penang Hokkien, and from a list of Malay words in Penang Hokkien I collected from the old Penang Hokkien Podcast forum, someone has translated it as "nearly" or "almost", however, I think I have heard it used differently at the beginning of a sentence with the meaning "to the extent that" or "until"

It was from one of the talks given by Ven. Dhammavuddho Thero about the life of the Buddha, and he was talking about how the Buddha originally tried to cut his eating down to a grain of rice a day. Then he got so weak he couldn't walk. The results of not eating (skin going dark, becoming weak etc.) were introduce with the word "sampai" at the beginning of the sentence.

I'd be very interested to know about some different uses of this word. Can it be used for "nearly" and "almost" as well? How about the other meaning that I heard, or was it just me misconstruing the meaning?

From my personal experience, sampai in Penang Hokkien has always been - as you mentioned - the equivalent of the Modern Standard Chinese 甚至 ("to the extent that/of..."). Don't think I have ever heard it used in the context of "almost/nearly" (but then again, being a non-native speaker myself, I could be wrong! )

Great! Just as I suspected! It's another Malay word like tapi, balu, and pun, that has become a core grammatical particle in Penang Hokkien vocabulary. I think sentence final koh may also be a crossover from sentence final "lagi" in Malay too.

I have regularly heard and used kău-kā in Penang, but in the context of 到/至 "up to / until", not for the specific context of "to the extent of..." (where sampai is used).

My father-in-law is of Eng-Ch'un descent, spent a number of years in Kedah, and now resides in Ipoh. He says 甚至săm-chî. I suspect the săm should really be sim, the former likely a corruption from Cantonese influence.

I was very curious about this, because I like to think of myself as coming from a thoroughly Baba family, but I was completely unaware of this borrowing.

I asked my parents on the weekend, and my dad confirmed the (very specific) usage that Ah-bin first gave, and which Mark confirmed. I mused to him that it was strange that I didn't know it at all, and my mother chimed in to confirm that - although she thoroughly mastered Penang Hokkien after she married my dad (and speaks it without an accent) - she too was not aware of this word at all (as a borrowed word into Penang Hokkien, of course she knows it as a Malay word). My father mused that it was rather old-fashioned, even in Baba usage, but I have no way of verifying this one way or the other.

Were the people who used it on the podcast all younger people, Ah-bin?

Strictly speaking, no. ka carries just the generic meaning of 'till', 'to', etc. 甚至 or sampai (to use the borrowed Malay term) has a specific meaning of "to the extent that / so much so that" (with an emphasis on the 'extent', hence 甚).

Mark Yong wrote:
My father-in-law is of Eng-Ch'un descent, spent a number of years in Kedah, and now resides in Ipoh. He says 甚至săm-chî. I suspect the săm should really be sim, the former likely a corruption from Cantonese influence.

I also hear sim-tsi all the time, including Korean. Taiwanese programmes may not always say the right thing, as things may change in Taiwan. Like 牽掛 - I dunno why it's pronounced tshian-kua...... Hm......

aokh1979 wrote:I also hear sim-tsi all the time, including Korean. Taiwanese programmes may not always say the right thing, as things may change in Taiwan. Like 牽掛 - I dunno why it's pronounced tshian-kua...... Hm......

Good observation, Aokh! 甚至 is sim7-tsi3 in some dictionaries I checked. However, none of them, including Taiwanese dict, have 牽掛 as tshian1-kua3. This came as a "shock" for me, as I always assume that is the "standard" pronunciation. May be that is Taiwanese influence upon my variant, my mom also says that tshian1-kua3 sounds more "correct" than khan1-kua3. Personally I feel that the latter sounds like doing divination.